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The End of the Middle East | Foreign Affairs 3/10/22, 10:47 AM
!e End of the Middle East

How an Old Map Distorts a New Reality
BY MARC LYNCH March/April 2022
MARC LYNCH is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George
Washington University.
In early December 2021, the Ethiopian government pulled o! a dramatic

reversal in its yearlong civil war with rebels from the Tigray region. Armed
with a new arsenal of drones and other forms of military support from Iran,
Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Ethiopian forces were able
to push back an o!ensive by the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, which
itself was supported by Somali "ghters, who were in turn backed by Qatar.
Many American observers were surprised by the direct involvement of no

fewer than four Middle Eastern countries in what appeared to be an
African con#ict. But such interest is hardly unusual. In recent years, Turkey
has established more than 40 consulates in Africa and a major military base
in Somalia. Israel has announced a “return to Africa,” in part to "nd new
alliances as it faces growing international pressure over its occupation of the
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1128451 Page 1 of 15
West Bank. Saudi Arabia has bought wide swaths of agricultural land in
Ethiopia and Sudan in pursuit of food security, and the UAE has built
naval bases across the Horn of Africa. Egypt has been embroiled in a
con#ict with Ethiopia over its plans for a dam at the head of the Nile River.
Nor are these entanglements limited to Africa. Oman has traditionally seen
itself as an Indian Ocean nation and maintains strong economic ties with
India, Iran, and Pakistan. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries have long
meddled deeply in the a!airs of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Turkey has
become increasingly involved in Central Asia, including with a military
intervention in Azerbaijan. Almost every Gulf state has recently upgraded
its partnerships with China and other Asian countries.
Amid these continual and growing transregional connections, however, U.S.

foreign policy remains wedded to a far narrower mental map of the Middle
East. Since the early years of the Cold War, the Washington establishment
has viewed the Middle East as the Arab world—broadly conceived as the
member states of the Arab League (with the exception of the geographic
outliers Comoros, Mauritania, and Somalia)—plus Iran, Israel, and Turkey.
$ese parameters feel natural to many. Based on geographic continuity,
common-sense understandings of the region, and twentieth-century
history, this is the Middle East of American university departments and
think tanks, as well as of the U.S. State Department.
But such a map is increasingly outdated. Leading regional powers operate

outside the traditional Middle East in much the same way as they operate
inside it, and many of the rivalries most important to the region now play
out beyond those assumed borders. $e Pentagon knows this: the region
covered by U.S. Central Command, the combatant command that handles
the Middle East, includes not only Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and the Gulf states
but also Afghanistan, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Pakistan, Somalia,
and Sudan—a grouping that is directly at odds with the State
Department’s Middle East.
Such a dramatic misalignment of the U.S. policymaking and military

establishments points to the dangers of clinging to the old model of the
region. Not only is the concept out of step with current politics and military
practice; it also hampers attempts to confront many of the biggest
challenges of the day, from serial refugee crises to Islamist insurgencies to
entrenched authoritarianism. Continuing to build scholarship and policy on
a legacy de"nition of the Middle East threatens to blind U.S. strategy to
the actual dynamics shaping the region—and, worse, makes Washington all
too likely to continue making disastrous blunders there.
COLD WAR CARTOGRAPHY

As set in stone as it now seems, the American concept of the Middle East
has little grounding in premodern history. For centuries, the Arab provinces
of North Africa and the Levant were part of the vast, multinational
Ottoman Empire. $e coastal communities of the Gulf were organically
linked to the Horn of Africa across the Red Sea. Islamic networks
connected Egypt and the rest of North Africa to areas deep in sub-Saharan
Africa. But instead of looking back that far, the United States adopted its
version of the region from a more recent source: the colonialism and great-
power politics of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe.
In the nineteenth century, British and French imperial projects gave rise to
the idea of a distinct region de"ned by North Africa and the Levant. In
1830, France occupied Algeria; in 1881, it captured Tunisia; and by 1912, it
also controlled Morocco. French colonial legacies of racial classi"cation,
and not the natural barrier of the Sahara, informed the distinction between
Black French Africa and a French Maghreb of lighter-skinned Arabs and
Berbers. $at same racism drew a hard barrier between culturally similar
populations of the Mediterranean basin, with white southern Europe
forcibly distinguished from the Near Eastern peoples across the sea in
North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.
$e British, for their part, called the region “the Near East” because of its
role as a transit point along the way to their primary colonial interests in
India and “the Far East,” or Asia. Following the opening of the Suez Canal
in 1869, the region took on new importance. British imperial interests now
connected the Arabian Peninsula to Egypt and the Levant, while
distinguishing those areas from points north, east, and south. And a string
of protectorates along the Arabian Peninsula remained under British
control all the way until 1971, reinforcing the old colonial boundaries long
after other forces had begun to reshape the region. A set of ideological
assumptions about the supposed exoticism of Arabs, Persians, and Turks, an
outlook that was famously termed “Orientalism” by the late Palestinian
American scholar Edward Said, helped give shape to the idea that this vast
region shared a common, backward culture.
After World War II, as the United States plunged headlong into Cold War
competition with the Soviet Union, the U.S. State Department adapted the
Anglo-French concept of the region for its own purposes. $e de"nition of
what the United States was now calling “the Middle East” (not quite as
near to Washington as to London) was informed by policymakers’ goals:
maintain access to oil in the Arabian Peninsula, protect Israel, and keep
former British and French possessions in North Africa out of the Soviet
sphere of in#uence.
During the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. economic and political priorities helped
institutionalize this map in academic and policymaking circles. $e 1958
National Defense Education Act channeled federal resources toward area
studies in support of Cold War priorities, and big nonpro"ts, such as the
Ford Foundation, joined the e!ort. $e new approach divided the world
into distinct regions, one of which was the Middle East. As a result,
scholars of the Middle East developed deep expertise about the cultures,
languages, history, and politics of the countries in that tightly de"ned area.
But they were not expected to know much of anything about sub-Saharan
Africa or Afghanistan and Pakistan, no matter how important those places
might be to the issues they were studying.
In those early years of the Cold War, the pan-Arabism of Egyptian

President Gamal Abdel Nasser reinforced the notion of the Middle East as
a cultural-political unity rather than an arti"cial construct. $e Palestinian
issue and struggles for decolonization energized and uni"ed the Arab
world, with heads of state de"ning themselves through their positions on
Israel and Arab uni"cation. And in Egypt and other North African
countries, racist attitudes about the populations of sub-Saharan Africa

contributed to the idea of the Middle East as ethnically and culturally
distinct from surrounding areas. $e incorporation of much of Central Asia
into the Soviet Union, meanwhile, justi"ed the exclusion of states such as
Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan from a region de"ned by Cold
War competition.
$is concept of the Middle East provided the foundation for a series of
U.S. foreign policy doctrines and security alliances, relationships that,
despite upheavals such as the Iranian Revolution, for many decades served
to keep the oil #owing and maintain stability. $ere were costs, however.
Trained to think according to this map, and often informed by Orientalist
views inherited from the colonial era, academics and policymakers tended
to draw conclusions about the region without taking into account the many
social and political forces that transcended its boundaries. For instance, the
9/11 attacks quickly produced a consensus that they had been driven by the
speci"c pathologies of the Arab Middle East. $e mountains of analysis
explaining jihadism through Arab culture often simply ignored the parallel
rise of Islamist and other forms of religious extremism in Africa, South
Asia, and many other parts of the world.
Similarly, the long-held idea that Muslim countries are somehow uniquely
resistant to democracy ignores the real drivers of autocratic resilience in the
Middle East: Western-backed oil monarchies and Arab strongmen with
little accountability to their poorly governed citizens. It also overlooks the
regular participation of Muslims in many democracies outside the Middle
East—from India and Indonesia to the United States itself. $e assumption

that Muslims would inevitably choose radical Islamist governments if they
had the chance has been used to justify decades of American failure to
support real political reform there.
In all these ways, the American concept of the Middle East has more often
been a limitation than an asset, yet for decades, it has proved remarkably
sticky. Even after 9/11 forcefully exposed the global connections of a group
such as al Qaeda, which had roots in Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and
Sudan, U.S. policy continued to be driven by the old paradigm. $e
invasion of Iraq was justi"ed in part by a determination to remake the
Middle East, with the George W. Bush administration’s “freedom agenda”
pushing a war of ideas aimed at an Arab world that was supposedly
uniquely prone to authoritarianism and sectarian violence. More recently,
similar assumptions led the United States to fail to anticipate—or react
e!ectively to—the wave of popular revolts that engulfed the Arab world in
2010–11.
POLITICS OUT OF BOUNDS

For U.S. policymakers, the Arab uprisings provided a deceptive lesson. At
"rst, the rapid spread of protests from Tunisia and Egypt to much of the
rest of the region seemed to show the renewed coherence of the Middle
East. Further underscoring the idea of a single geopolitical arena was the
jockeying that followed: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE intervened in
wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen and meddled in the transitions occurring
in Egypt and Tunisia. Yet the countries in the region whose in#uence grew
the most—Iran, Israel, and Turkey—were not part of the Arab world at all.
Moreover, Arab autocrats quickly came to view the interconnectedness of

their populations as a threat to their own survival, and many sought to
crack down on pan-Arab political movements such as the Muslim
Brotherhood and liberal activist networks alike. $e hopes of regionwide
political change were instead quashed by a new fracturing, with Libya and
Syria descending into chaos and many of the Arab monarchs looking for
new sources of legitimacy that had little to do with the broader Arab
public.
Today, if anything, political developments in many Middle Eastern

countries have made the region’s traditional boundaries increasingly
meaningless. Sudan’s 2018 revolution—and its more recent military coup,
which was backed by Egypt, a leading Middle East power, but opposed by
the African Union, an international body representing 55 African states—
showed the extent to which the country straddles two regions. Elsewhere in
Africa, migration and the growth of Islamist insurgencies across the Sahel
have shifted the political, security, and economic interests of the Maghreb
states southward. Libya’s civil war has fueled #ows of migrants, weapons,
drugs, and radicalism across central Africa, further blurring the line
between North Africa and the rest of the continent. Many of the migrants
arriving in Europe from the Middle East originate in countries south of the
Sahara. In response to the growing strategic importance of the Sahel,
Morocco has focused on spreading its religious authority in West Africa,
and Algeria has been involved in security operations in Mali.
Other political dynamics have also revealed the limited value of de"ning
the Middle East as a single geographic area. $e Iranian-Saudi rivalry, for

example, has little relevance in North Africa. $e political battle among
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE after the 2017 blockade of Qatar by
several states in the region played out in a competition for support not only
in neighboring Arab countries but also across the African continent and
even in Washington. $e appeal of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS),
even more than that of al Qaeda, was more global than regional, as
manifested by the #ow of foreign "ghters to Syria and the spread of the
movement across Africa and Asia. It is di%cult to sustain counterterrorism
models based on problems said to be uniquely Arab when some of the most
active jihadi insurgencies unfold in Mali, Nigeria, and Somalia.
Meanwhile, some of the largest recent con#icts have de"ed the region’s
assumed geography. Libya’s civil war destabilized Mali and other African
neighbors. When Saudi Arabia built a coalition to back its intervention
against Yemen’s Houthi rebels in 2015, it not only sought help from like-
minded Arab states; it also solicited support from Eritrea, Pakistan, and
Sudan, which contributed bases and troops. At the same time, the UAE’s
enforcement of a naval blockade against the Houthis has led it to build up a
military presence across the Horn of Africa and to fortify the strategically
located island of Socotra, which is closer to Africa than the Arabian
Peninsula. Although it is often seen as a paradigmatic Middle Eastern war,
the con#ict in Yemen has played out in ways that call into question the
supposed borders of the region.
MARKETS MOVING EAST

Just as recent political dynamics have rendered the old map of the Middle
East obsolete, so have large-scale social changes. From the 1950s through
the 1980s, the mass migration of laborers from poorer Arab countries to the
rapidly developing Gulf states created powerful connections within the
region. Remittances played a key role in the informal economies of Egypt
and most of the states in the Levant, and workers’ extended stays in Gulf
countries enabled the spread of conservative Islamist ideas that had not
previously found much purchase outside Saudi Arabia. But after the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait in 1990, during which Palestinian and Yemeni workers
were often seen as disloyal, Arab migrant laborers were increasingly
replaced in the country by politically safer South Asian workers. $at trend
has greatly weakened the economic and social ties between the Gulf and
the rest of the Middle East, while correspondingly strengthening those ties
between the Gulf and countries across the Indian Ocean.
Similarly, Arab media have lost much of their thematic coherence. Until
2011, Arab satellite television did much to shape a common culture at a
popular level, including during the Arab uprisings. But in the decade since,
the media landscape has become Balkanized, mirroring the region’s political
polarization. $us, where Al Jazeera served as a common platform for Arab
public politics in the 1990s and early years of this century, after 2011, it
became just one among many partisan media platforms, including the
Saudi-based Rotana Media Group, the Emirati-based Al Arabiya, and
Iran’s Arabic-language Al-Alam. Such stations reinforce political
polarization, with each one’s narrative embraced by those within its political
ambit and scorned by those outside it. Social media, once a force for the
Arab public’s integration, has been weaponized by regimes such as those in
Egypt and Saudi Arabia through the widespread use of bot armies and
censorship and has fragmented into hostile silos.
Over the past two decades, global "nancial markets have themselves
reshaped the orientation of some of the wealthiest Middle Eastern
countries, including Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Given
their deep investments in Western real estate and sports clubs, their
growing economic ties to Asia, and their large populations of non-Arab
service workers and Western expatriates, it increasingly makes more sense
to view these places as centers of global capitalism than as Middle Eastern
states; Dubai has more in common with Singapore or Hong Kong than
with Beirut or Baghdad. Similarly, Saudi Arabia’s and the UAE’s use of
Israeli-made digital surveillance tools mirrors China’s model as much as it
does those of other Arab regimes. Such global ties in economics and
technology may soon come to play as much of a role in these states’ foreign
policies as any traditional regional priorities do—pushing them closer to
Asia, say, or providing new incentives for them to manipulate elections in
Western democracies.
In turn, the Israeli-Palestinian con#ict, which once served as a unifying

force in the Arab world, has dramatically faded in importance. $e Boycott,
Divest, and Sanctions movement, which is aimed at Israel’s escalating
settlements in the West Bank, has attracted more interest on American
college campuses and in the halls of Congress than in the Middle East.
Europe, the United Nations, and the International Criminal Court are
more central battle"elds for Israeli-Palestinian disputes than any Arab
capital. $e Palestinian cause today, while gaining unprecedented support

in the West, has rarely enjoyed less sympathy from the states of the Arab
region, as demonstrated by the decision of Bahrain and the UAE to
normalize relations with Israel in the 2020 Abraham Accords. Despite the
limited tangible implications of that agreement, Israelis have seemed to
embrace it with a sense of catharsis, in part because it signaled the passing
of the Middle East as a primary arena of security or political concerns—for
Arabs as well as for Israelis.
THEIR MAP, NOT OURS

For 75 years, the Middle East as we know it has in large part been a
construct of American primacy. For much of that time, the U.S. map made
sense because Washington’s priorities in the region could go a signi"cant
way toward in#uencing the region’s politics. Washington’s Cold War
strategic doctrines shaped alliances and interventions from the time of the
1956 Suez crisis, when the United States displaced France and the United
Kingdom as the primary Western power in the region, until the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989. $e 1990–91 Gulf War entrenched an American
regional order, in which all roads seemed to lead to Washington. $e
United States monopolized stewardship of the Arab-Israeli peace process,
from the Madrid conference through the Oslo accords, and its dual
containment of Iran and Iraq de"ned the geopolitics of the Gulf.
But the global position of the United States has rapidly declined, and so,
too, has the coherence of a region largely organized around U.S. interests.
Amid the fallout from the disastrous decision to invade Iraq in 2003, three
successive U.S. presidents have sought to downgrade U.S. commitments in
the Middle East and pivot toward Asia. And with the United States
perceived to be in retreat, regional powers have asserted their own
de"nitions of the region: an order centered on the Indian Ocean for the
Gulf states, a trans-Sahel orientation for North African states. $is does
not mean that the traditional zones of con#ict have vanished. Iran, for
example, has spread its proxy networks and in#uence throughout the
shattered states of Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen and is locked in a
growing competition with Israel and Saudi Arabia. But like its regional
rivals, Iran has also upped its activities in Africa and begun building
partnerships with states in Asia, especially China.
For the United States, the rise of jihadi insurgencies in sub-Saharan Africa
has rendered obsolete the Middle East–focused counterterrorism doctrine
that emerged after 9/11. Although U.S. forces have withdrawn from Iraq
and Syria, U.S. drone strikes and counterterrorism operations continue
from Somalia through the Sahel. Confusingly, even as the United States
signals that it is getting out of the Middle East, it is maintaining or
expanding the same military architecture, to deal with many of the same
security concerns, in the Sahel and East Africa.
And now, the United States must also contend with Beijing, which thinks
di!erently about the Middle East than Washington does. China’s map of
the region follows its own strategic interests, not Washington’s. $rough its
Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing has expanded its energy interests in the
Gulf and its presence in Africa. It has signed a series of agreements with
Gulf states, bridging the divide between Iran and the Arab Gulf states by
downplaying politics and focusing on infrastructure and energy resources.

China’s growing involvement has opened up new prospects for stabilizing
oil production and other forms of regional cooperation, but it has also
multiplied the opportunities for dangerous misunderstandings, as
Washington seeks to balance its own regional interests with its growing
rivalry with China.
If U.S. scholars, analysts, and policymakers were to begin to understand the

Middle East less as a discrete geographic area and more as a #uid collection
of states and populations through which broader social forces and shifting
contests for power #ow, many of these recent developments would seem far
less surprising. $inking beyond the traditional Middle East would also
have direct analytic and strategic bene"ts for Washington, not only because
it would entail the recovery of forgotten history but also because it would
lead to a better understanding of the fast-changing realities on the ground.
But there are risks to a transregional approach. Simply adopting the

Pentagon’s broader de"nition of the region may end up reproducing the
security-driven focus that has characterized many of the failed U.S. policies
in Afghanistan and the Middle East over the past two decades. $is would
be a tragedy. A transregional lens should allow academics and policymakers
not only to move beyond the old paradigms but also to rethink how the
United States promotes development and good governance abroad. It could
help Washington generate a more e!ective response to Africa’s and
Europe’s migration crisis, better align world powers to respond to Libya’s
and Yemen’s catastrophic wars, and avoid unnecessary con#ict with China
in areas and on issues on which cooperation would make far more sense.
Abandoning old cultural and political assumptions about the Middle East
and viewing the region within a broader global context could also enable
the United States and its allies to "nally get serious about defending
human rights and promoting real democratic change there.
By remaining locked in an outdated concept of the region, Washington

risks truncating its understanding of the behavior and interests of the
Middle East’s main players; misunderstanding the actions there of other
global powers, such as China; and overestimating the e!ects of an
American retreat. It will be di%cult to think beyond the Middle East:
accumulated expertise, deeply internalized thought patterns, and
entrenched bureaucratic structures all stand in the way. But the changing
dynamics of global power and regional practice are rapidly reorienting
many leading Middle Eastern states, and the map they are following is no
longer Washington’s; the map is their own. It is now up to Washington to
learn to read it.
Copyright © 2022 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.

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The End of the Middle East | Foreign Affairs 3/10/22, 10:47 AM

!e End of the Middle East

In early December 2021, the Ethiopian government pulled o! a dramatic

Many American observers were surprised by the direct involvement of no

Amid these continual and growing transregional connections, however, U.S.

But such a map is increasingly outdated. Leading regional powers operate

Such a dramatic misalignment of the U.S. policymaking and military

COLD WAR CARTOGRAPHY

In those early years of the Cold War, the pan-Arabism of Egyptian

countries, racist attitudes about the populations of sub-Saharan Africa

East—from India and Indonesia to the United States itself. $e assumption

POLITICS OUT OF BOUNDS

Moreover, Arab autocrats quickly came to view the interconnectedness of

Today, if anything, political developments in many Middle Eastern

the Middle East as a single geographic area. $e Iranian-Saudi rivalry, for

MARKETS MOVING EAST

In turn, the Israeli-Palestinian con#ict, which once served as a unifying

capital. $e Palestinian cause today, while gaining unprecedented support

THEIR MAP, NOT OURS

downplaying politics and focusing on infrastructure and energy resources.

If U.S. scholars, analysts, and policymakers were to begin to understand the

But there are risks to a transregional approach. Simply adopting the

By remaining locked in an outdated concept of the region, Washington

Copyright © 2022 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.

Source URL: https://www.foreignaﬀairs.com/articles/middle-east/2022-02-22/end-

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